


Flight Paths

by LightDescending



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: Augmentation and recovery from that process, Augmentation being a very invasive medical procedure with severe side effects, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/F, Flight as an extended metaphor for a lot of things, Love without a confession, Mild Angst, Post-Apocalypse, Time Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:06:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25480627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending
Summary: Before Legion claimed the networks and the atmosphere, Grace remembers flying.And after, all she can think about is the sky.Or, a one-shot focused on Grace and how she feels about flight and piloting, with background Grace/Dani.
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos
Comments: 16
Kudos: 32





	Flight Paths

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [In The Legion of Angels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503126) by [Tyellas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas). 



Before Legion claimed the networks and the atmosphere, Grace remembers flying.

Acceleration made her stomach feel funny, and Grace had to squeeze her eyes shut when the ground lurched out from under them. It was the only way to avoid feeling like some indelible part of her had been smeared through the air, left behind on the runway.

Once they were in the air, she refused to sit still and _properly,_ like her mom kept asking her to when not distracted by whatever pulp novel she had her nose in. Instead, Grace levered her gangly body into the seat, folding her legs underneath her, and pressed an eager and sweaty hand up against the tiny oval window next to her.

The plane dipped her towards the tiny buildings below as the plane curved, upwards into the sky – then, as it evened out, Grace got a side-slice of the landscape. She remembers green, and the tiny sketched lines of highways with cars scrolling along them like tiny pencil dots. Next, a ripple-wave of mountains jutting up into the sky, creamy-capped with snow. And clouds. So thick, and so abundant, that Grace felt like if she were to squeeze herself through the window, she could balance herself on them. Go running, kicking up shreds of cloud behind her with her feet. Like the way that grass sometimes flies behind her on the soccer field beneath her cleats.

From up there, Grace figured she could see the whole world.

Her mom had said when she was older, they’d be able to save up and go for another trip. To Europe, maybe.

She’d nodded, wide-eyed, without turning around – her eyes fixed on all that she could see outside. Her nose squished, framed by the splay of her fingers, and her breath fogged up the plasticky-surface.

Who needed in-flight entertainment? Grace busied herself the entire time staring at the scene laid out in miniature beneath them. She didn’t look away, not once, unwilling to give up the dizzying stomach-fluttering freedom she felt. Not even when they started their descent and she had to dangle her feet back over the edge of her seat, numb with pins and needles shooting splinters in through her shins from how long she’d sat unmoving. She remained with her spine twisted towards the panorama before her, and the clear, almost translucent blue of the sky.

* * *

All other details from the first and only flight she went on have faded. She can no longer remember how old she was, or where she and her family were going – somewhere far away, impossibly far now. Not Europe. Grace wonders if there’s anywhere left on the planet that’s untouched by the Machines.

Her family had gone to the other side of the country, she thinks. A city that had smelled bad, and was too noisy and crowded, with too many lights and buildings so tall that the sky looked trapped. As if it were pinned behind the glass and steel bars penetrating it.

All of that’s probably gone now. Like all the years she tries very hard not to remember. 

Hell, she might be twice as old now as she was back then.

In the Resistance base, they have maps. Grace pulls them out, now and again, to see what sections of the maps have been rough-washed over with inks. These designate the often-diminishing zones where Resistance chapters have taken hold; another colour indicates where independent settlements are slowly being whittled away; a third, unknown territory. Big black boundaries delineate Legion's territory, with ripples outward if they've expanded it. Grace traces her finger along them, recalling what it was like to travel through them until recently - wondering if her current haunts will be swallowed up as wel. Some places manage to feel nearly unchanged, until you remember that somewhere above are satellites, and that they are keeping an eye out for anyone caught in the open.

For years, the only presence overhead has been Legion drones, or HK units.

Her superiors want to change that. What remains of ‘copters and planes are being repaired to sky-worthiness or stripped of parts to construct something called a _hoverflier_. There are rumours, whispers, of fortifications arriving soon. Advancements being made, thanks to scavenged Legion tech. Large-scale human or resource transportation relies on their success. So, Grace dons an increasingly filthy set of Carhartts every day and slips underneath some kind of ‘flier with a toolkit. Her Army supervisor barks verbal directives. She sits in the cockpits with other grease-jockies and they manually reverse engineer what the hell the different switches and controls do.

From where they sit on the map, they’ll have to evacuate any day now. The boundary of an unstable zone where Legion is making inroads creeps closer every day – if it gets within 100 klicks of them, they’ll need to bolt. The local topography has made it challenging for the Machines to lead incursions or suss out human outposts; doesn’t mean they can’t succeed.

Grace tries not to listen too closely; also ignores the rising urge to scope the tops of the rolling mountains around them for Legion scouts. She joins her fellow soldiers in drills and exercises that punch tension out of her muscles; becomes intimately acquainted with guns and artillery; attends briefings headed up by some scientists called the Dysons, whoever they are. Enhancements for soldiers sent to hot spots are mentioned more and more frequently.

Whenever Dani shows up on base, looking more tired each time, Grace scrambles to get her in view. When addressing the individual divisions, Dani sometimes speaks of The Soldier who saved her – someone who came back for her. Grace feels something funny in her stomach when she catches Dani’s eye during those speeches. Like the ground’s rushing behind her, and the long view’s becoming clearer every second. Dani speaks of them almost reverentially, with great pain and love and gratitude in her voice depending on the day. Grace wants to be like whoever that soldier was. But Dani keeps telling her no whenever she begs to be sent to the frontlines – that she’s needed _here_ , and so Grace listens, and tamps down the growing ember of impatience that lives in her core.

Dani says that a bombed-out Iron Mountain facility nearby might be their best chance yet to go underground, once they can assure themselves that Legion won’t trace them there.

Underground.

Won’t that make it feel like the Machines have won?

Now and again, Grace wipes sweat from her forehead while leaving a smear of some fluid or another in the wake of her hand. She squints through the salt trickling into her eyes and the bright-searing light of the sun; or, if it’s a cloudy day, she interrogates the slate and the spin of whatever weather system’s above her.

It might not belong to her anymore, but she still wants to know that this is all up here.

* * *

In her nightmares, sometimes she is fleeing – gravel, splintered metal, sometimes bone-dust stirred among the concrete – and overhead is the whirring fan-blade sound of death.

She’s leaping over the crater in the building, and sometimes she’s falling into it. Or the scavengers get to her first.

Sometimes the HK sees her, and she’s pinioned under the red-glare of its eye.

No matter what, in the end Dani is always there.

On very rare occasions, Grace dreams she’s a being of wind and fury, and she tears the HKs down with lightning in her fists and a hurricane shriek in her throat. She wakes up from these visions sweating, elated.

* * *

As the Resistance becomes more entrenched and the Machines stop rolling out T-models and introduce the Rev-series, the word _conscription_ comes up more and more. Dani is one Commander among many, and even with her pull she can’t prevent the inevitable.

Grace is enlisted.

She goes out on raids that she stumbles back from bloody and shaking and dazed and unable to recall exactly what happened.

Grace works out until she can’t suck in a proper breath, scarfs down her rations, and then repeats the exercise.

Some of her friends don’t come back.

They lose.

They lose some more.

Maps now show a landscape pockmarked with human-holdouts in a sea of Legion.

Grace insists on being placed with the aerial units – the dragonflies, which can skim several yards above the ground and zig-zag between crumbling shells of buildings easily. Missions hop-skip from place to place, focused on consolidating survivors. Grace gets really fucking good at hauling ass with someone slung fireman style across her shoulders. Gets really good at triage. She’s an evac and a techie – _I put these things together, you think I won’t know what to do with them if they take a hit? –_ and a damn good shot.

They lose some more anyways.

She watches enhanced soldiers – the Augments, that’s what they’re called – stomping through the hallways on scarred limbs. They’ve got a high, falcon-bright stare and short-shaved heads and she marvels at the demos where they punch dents the size of a skull into the sides of a gutted car.

In the mess hall she plunks her half-ration tray down onto an adjacent table, eavesdropping as they mutter about drug regimes and titanium nano-particle injections and whatever the fuck _ultra-sonic sintering_ is. Doesn’t matter. She wants in.

After all, this must be the kind of Soldier who Dani keeps mentioning. Everyone else on base is _meat_. Grace feels fragile in her skin. 

They tell her 70% of all Augmentations are volunteers who have suffered near-lethal wounds. They tell her not to sign on unless she’s dying, or wishes she was.

Grace is crawling up on three times as old as she was when Judgment Day shattered her life. Getting close to surpassing the average life expectancy these days. It’s not that she wishes she were dead, exactly, but that she doesn’t really care… except attempting to sign up would be admitting as much to Dani, and Grace isn’t sure how well that would go over. The Commander still checks in. No way she wouldn’t catch word if Grace applied.

More missions. These ones accompanying Dani, who they need along because she’s the best at negotiations. Pleading with factions in outposts to abandon their bunkers. For the most part it goes well. Dani Ramos has a way with words. _I’d show her my way with words,_ a sort-of-friend says while making an obscene gesture with her tongue, and Grace needs to be pulled off her. Fury comingles with shame, because how many times has she gotten off while imagining the same kind of thing?

When her unit, on standby, sees the ambush occur, Grace remembers an aircraft free-falling – the impossible careening arc, the crash, fire from the explosion gouting over her head on the freeway. All the evacuating families in gridlock screaming. That’s how she feels. Mayday. 

She can’t bring herself to touch Dani, so instead she clutches the gun they’ve given her to her armoured torso. Just stares at the woman, bandaged and oxygenated and with half their medic team onboard compressing wounds and checking vitals. When they get back to base, Grace turns her eyes to the skies even as she runs across the hardpacked uneven ground.

Watches the drones whine into position overhead.

Sucks in a breath just in time to feel them drop.

* * *

Her Augmented body runs too hot.

She drags the weight of it around, and it takes Grace weeks to learn how to walk again. She’s gone from a cohesive bodily unit to a poorly assembled collection of parts and all of them are trying to get to know one another again. Her feet don’t recognize the impulses of her legs to run. Her arms feel clumsy and swinging, until her new strength kicks in. There’s a drug-induced brainfog – half to manage the pain, and the other to stop her new skin and subdermal mesh from being rejected. Grace spends weeks weeping, blinking away the notifications and blurry imprints of her new eyes. Everything _hurts_.

She pores over the manuals they gave her, too fucked up to parse what she’s reading, and the mentor they assign her tells her it’s gonna be quicker to learn basic functions through trial and error. He teaches the basic hotkey gestures. How to download diagrammatic and icon-based learning tutorials from the Dyson database for Augments. Stumbling her way through rehab, Grace learns to envy the soldiers who haven’t had this done to them. The meatbags seem so full of vitality in comparison to the way she feels. So far it’s all downside and no upshot. Her rage is trapped inside and she can’t move well enough yet to release it the way she’s used to.

Until…

At the four week mark, a smooth voiced doctor tells her that if she’s made it this far she’s probably ready for combat training, since she hasn’t died yet.

Grace wants to tell them to fuck off – her bones are still screaming at her in the night, and she hasn’t slept more than 3 hour spans since she woke up from the coma – but they insist.

She’s going to blow the whole thing off, but then she hears that Dani will be in attendance. 

It’s a new frontier for their developers. And they want Grace to be the guinea pig. 

She stares at the hoverflier in front of her, dwarfed against the interior of this underground hangar. The flier is different from the usual – sleeker, more like a slimmed down fighter-plane, with a single person cockpit that’ll seat the pilot in a recumbent position. Grace shrugs off the researcher’s hands when they try to do up the harness around her; but once she’s adjusted how it fits and secured the crossbar that drops between her breasts, they lower a secondary apparatus on top of the first and secure it.

The scientists step back to a safe distance, outside the radius chipped and indicated on the floor; the flier’s front window hinges down, sealing pneumatically. She feels a slight vibration in her eardrums, magnified, like she’s underwater.

And then the apparatus begins to light up, an electric turquoise glow meeting each of the small sensors implanted at her wrists, her collarbones, her biceps. As each one activates, Grace gasps – there’s a corresponding relay to her neural interface, and the HUD starts to sketch a familiar set of controls in lines only she can see across the interior of the pod. 

Grace glances to the side, and sees Dani stepping through the door. Her saviour and commander, looking on – when Grace zoom-focuses on her, she sees Dani’s brow is furrowed and her mouth slightly parted in wonder.

Grace skims her hand along the throttle, dances through a sequence of commands.

The engines roar around her, and she feels the craft rumbling… whining… _lifting…_

All the pain she’s been feeling doesn’t ebb, exactly, but her awareness of it lessens. Grace can feel her mouth dry in anticipation; her palms start to itch. It’s so responsive. Much more so than any of the other vehicles she’s commandeered to date. And it’s not a perfect fit either, but she can feel the potential – the seat, almost ready to be moulded to her form; the wings, tilting and dipping as she adjusts how much exhaust is being put out. She raises it higher. Higher still. Proximity indicators flash on, showing her how she’s oriented in the space – relative distances to the ceilings and the walls. This isn’t an aircraft. It’s an extension of her.

She is weightless, at last.

She _is_ the interface.

Weeks go by after that proof of concept flight, and the flier is outfitted with weapons, additional widgets and functions. Databases get installed into her central processor, granting access to new and fascinating learning experiences that Grace watches late at night, until sleep tugs her eyelids down despite her will to keep learning.

At last there comes a day when a postage stamp of grey light appears at the top of a shaft, and she flings her hands towards it, almost pressing them eagerly to the glass of the pod.

She accelerates through that opening, defiant as a flare loosed into the night. A signal.

Grace takes to the skies, and she’s never the same.

Until her body becomes her own in the months that follow, Grace becomes as a bird of prey. The Machines cannot catch her. The clouds become her cover, confusing Legion arrays; the ash and snow below her show up Legion’s carbon-black drones. She picks them off with ease. Darts between their self-immolating detonations, spinning and diving, deft as any swallow. She finds that after returning, it’s easier to step on the ground – the gift it gives is perspective. Flight lightens her.

She can see the world again.

* * *

With her, and others like her, Legion starts to suffer some losses. Small ones. There are other plots, too: ground attacks, EMPs strikes, Faraday nets. Individually, they wouldn’t do enough. Together…

Dani’s waiting for her, one day when Grace returns. She’s wiping down the flier, checking on damages incurred that she’ll be able to buff out, when her Commander steps into view.

Grace snaps to attention, then lowers her hand when Dani slowly shakes her head.

“You seem happy,” and Dani says it like she’s checking the weather.

“Another good run – I mean. I am.”

“Good. That’s good.” Dani seems to hesitate then, running a hand across the shell of the flier. She lets her palm rest, there, and Grace wishes it were her that Dani was touching.

“What do you think of when you’re up there? What do you feel?” She asks without looking over.

“I…”

Smeared. Left behind. Like she’s fast enough to escape. Connected, integrated, free.

“I feel powerful. Useful,” Grace replies, to which Dani nods. 

“If I asked you to stop – if I asked you to stay,” Dani says after a time, “would you?”

Grace knows what the correct answer is. Dani’s looking at her, _into_ her, with her head slightly tipped forward. But they’re so close, too close to give up now. Grace can feel it, the tipping point – practically sees it on the horizon, like a blazing sun, just out of sight, backlighting the clouds. Just a little further, a little faster, and she’s not going to crash and burn, she’s going to make this right with the rest of them. Because the Resistance is _winning_ …

“…No.”

Dani’s expression sours, her mouth twisting down.

Grace’s heart plummets.

Dani raps on the exterior, once, and drops her hand to her side. Then she smiles, and it’s the bleakest look Grace has ever seen on Dani’s face in her life.

“You always did insist on your own way. Who am I to deny you that?”

She’s walking away before Grace can fully absorb the implications of what Dani’s said, and by that point it’s too late.

They find the Time Gate soon after.

* * *

Grace has flown the chopper, so it’s insulting when Sarah nods towards the C-5 and asks her if she can work that set of controls. She feels rather than hears the snort that leaves her mouth.

“Of course I can.”

In fact, this plane is rudimentary compared to what she’s used to, and Grace hates being tethered to the front while the others fight a battle she’s sure she could end in three seconds. Her hands are slippery against the control wheel – battle rages, gunshots rattling against the open cargo door, the sucking wind, Sarah and Carl and _Dani somewhere behind her—_

But because of the sequencing, the acceleration, the ascent to a cruising altitude, Grace can’t contribute anything except to _pilot_. She has to concentrate. To focus on the clumsy, graceless controls beneath her hands – the demanding, squalling needs of this brainless machine – and out the window ahead of her is nothing but the black night sky.

So she draws in a deep breath. Stills herself, and looks again, and thinks about what she’s doing.

When at last Sarah shouts up to her that they’re good, they’re away and clear, Grace levels them out. The cargo plane takes ages to obey her, but when she punches the autopilot and takes her hand away, their trajectory stays true. Grace waits for a split second. Nothing happens. All is well.

How disorienting, for a moment, that it can continue flying without her.

Dani watches her, biting her lip, as Grace reaches up to touch the roof of the cabin. She talks about what comes next, aware of how it feels to have Dani look at her like that.

“We have a problem.”

Carl presents them with the smoking remnants of their plan – the shattered EMPs – and Grace nearly spins out, slumping back into her seat.

* * *

“Then, we have to find some more weapons, and we stick to the plan. We set the trap–”

“No, Dani–”

“–and then we–”

“–You can’t _do_ that.”

How many times has Grace heard Dani tell her the same thing?

“Why? Because my _son_ is supposed to save us all? And until then what? We just keep watching people _die?”_

“The future of the human race depends on you—”

“I don’t give a shit about the future!” Dani yells at her, “or what I’m _maybe_ supposed to do someday! What matters are the choices we make _now_.”

Grace could laugh at the absurdity of it all. This must be what Dani had felt, so many times – explaining The Soldier. Looking Grace square in the face, sometimes, waiting for recognition, or acknowledgement. And instead, all those years, Grace kept trying to get away. And all those years, Dani trying to hold her like a bird in the hand, desperate to keep her safe.

“I’ve seen that look too many times,” Grace says, defeated and proud all at once.

“You know me. In the future.”

“Yeah. I know you.”

* * *

Grace thinks she would have liked being a pilot in this version of the world.

Even if she’d never gotten a chance to be the craft, to integrate so closely with it that she could fly with the quickness of a thought. She’d had an overwhelming sense as a child that it everything was so close – that family or adventure was just a few hours away, once you got through the boredom of a security check, took your shoes off and on again, sat in uncomfortable chairs, and then got through a gate once you waited for an entire line of people in front of you. Earth being so small, after all. If she’d had more time, there were so many places she would have liked to go. Europe, maybe. How had anyone ever gotten used to that being possible?

She’d give everything up to be that kid with her face pressed to an airplane window again – except for one person.

She’s speaking her world into existence. The one that Dani saved her from. The scavengers into militias into an army. It is the only place Grace could be saying these things: while in motion. 

* * *

Dani is sitting back, eyes suddenly shining, and Grace can feel tears in her own – not spilling over, just resting.

She slips from her chair and kneels.

In front of her is the woman she would do anything for.

The plane flies itself. It doesn’t need her.

“You taught us that there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

Underneath her feet are thousands of humans. The lights and the sprawl of them, cities and towns and endless highways, tiny cars. Dark lakes that suck up all the light. Power plants spewing steam into the air, the occasional bright twinkling star of a refinery flare. Because she is enhanced, she can look out and see overlays - maps, showing her the territory that they're passing over, locating them in space. Just her, Dani, Sarah, and Carl: they are everywhere, and they are nowhere, up here. Grace can feel all those people they’re separated from, for a moment – the weight and the lightness of the whole fragile system. An empty gap below her. She is moving so quickly away from them. Are any of them looking up right now, at the curve of light overhead that they’re tracing?

“Dani, you are not the mother of some man who saves the future. You are the future.”

She’s looking at Dani, who’s looking at her, and not hearing the words that she’s saying anymore. Because for the first time she realizes something, in the loop that they draw with their lives, in the choices they circumnavigate together. 

_If I asked you to stay, would you?_

Now she knows what that meant. Grace wishes she’d said yes.

Grace stays kneeling, telling Dani who she is, and she doesn’t need to look outside anymore to see her world.

It’s not out there.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit must be given to starfoozle and agendermetalbender, both of whom have contributed to excited meta discussions about how bones could be reinforced with titanium! I love you both so much. 
> 
> You'll notice I also said this piece was inspired by Legion of Angels, which is a masterful piece of worldbuilding that took my heart apart and put it back together again. Character backstory for Grace, imaginative and original writing about how the Resistance works and where the Augment program came from, and a really satisfying answer to the "what is Legion and what does it want" question. Byrch was the first person I'm aware of who came up with the whole "Augments can interface directly with hoverfliers" _or_ the "Dysons as tech developers for the Resistance" bit, so I have to give credit where it's due. I also highly recommend checking out [Crosstalk](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25005796) by Alcalexandria, which is a brilliant little fic about soldiers gossiping. It's where I saw mentioned Dani's using stories about The Soldier to motivate folks! 
> 
> Thank you for reading this strange little piece! I have more one-shots I'd like to write in between my longer projects (I'm still working on the Pacific Rim AU)


End file.
